B&N Nook is Failing Because They Make Customers Hate Them

Barnes and Noble is the only company in the e-reader and eBook sector that has nothing but alienated their customers. There have been many cases over the years where the lost users in droves, due to a myriad of factors. Recently, the bookseller announced it was closing their app store, video store and UK e-book store. Instead of making it easy for people to access their content, users have to jump through a million hoops.

Barnes and Noble was one of the first big companies to capitalize on the emerging e-reader space in 2009. They released their first e-ink device that year and it had 3G and wireless internet access. One year later they released their first Android tablet, and it was a critical success.

Most of the executives that were put in charge of the Nook team were basically people from the bookstore division. Bookstores rarely innovate and they were put in charge of technology that changes in a monthly basis.

What did Barnes and Noble do to alienate their customers and start to lose millions of dollars every single quarter? It was a combination of bad hardware, software and terrible business decisions.

The Nook Tablet Debacle

The first major disconnect between Barnes and Noble and their growing user base was December 21st 2011 when the company disabled the ability to sideload apps from other Android markets. The 1.4.1 firmware update for the Nook Tablet closed a loophole that allowed people to install apps via the internet browser. Since it was around Christmas many people received this tablet as a gift and thousands of devices were returned, while the Nook Boards blew up with angry customers who said they would never do business with the company again.

Lack of Memory Angers e-reader Loyalists

In April 2012 Barnes and Noble unveiled their second generation Nook Simple Touch for $139. The prime selling point behind this model was the front-lit technology. Ironically B&N was a pioneer in this new lightning technology and the entire industry cloned their LED system later that year.

People did not realize how much the Nook e-reader brand has changed until they started to read the fine print. For the first time ever Barnes and Noble edited the memory partition to only allow 500 MB of user loaded content, even though there was 4 GB of total on-device storage. This now prevented users from adding their entire e-book library to their e-reader, which drove many ballistic.

Thousands of users returned their devices and the Nook Boards blew up once more in a feeble attempt to show the company their disdain and to try and get them to reverse the decision. As always, B&N did not listen to their users and begun to slowly lose the e-reader war to companies such as Amazon and Kobo.

You Can No Longer Backup your e-books

In early 2014 Barnes and Noble removed the ability to download eBooks that customers had purchased from the online Nook Store to their computer. They did this so users could not strip the encryption or read the Nook books on 3rd party e-reading apps. This was considered the last straw and many loyal Nook users and they began to openly mock the company for being out of touch.

Barnes and Noble Outsources Nook Design to Samsung

In August 2014 Barnes and Noble made the internal decision to outsource their new line of Nook tablets to Samsung. The end result was the Samsung Galaxy Tab 4 Nook 7 and 10.1 inch editions.

The funny thing about this move is that there is no Nook branding anywhere on the physical device. The only aspect about the tablets that remotely have anything to do with Barnes and Noble is a few customized apps to browse the online bookstore and view your purchases.

The move to do business with Samsung resulted in B&N losing its cultural identity as a hardware business and now they just make apps and sell e-books. Many in the business thought this was a very poor decision and in the months leading up to the new hardware, many top executives were fired.

Barnes and Noble closes International Windows App.

Barnes and Noble has been operating a Windows 8 e-reading app since 2012 that allows users to buy e-books and magazines. It was available in 40 different countries and instead of paying the bookseller directly it’s done via your Microsoft Account.

On August 7th 2015 Barnes and Noble announced that they were closing the bookstore and only US customers would have access. Anyone who bought e-books had a very limited window in which they could get refunds from Microsoft and then they would lose all of their content.

Many international users who wanted an alternative to Amazon were caught completely off-guard. One day they opened the app only to find out everything they bought was gone and the e-reading function was disabled.

Barnes and Noble Announces Closure of the Nook UK Store

B&N hired their 3rd CEO last September and Ron Boire said he was going to revitalize the retail chain and clean house in the Nook division.

This resulted in the announcement last week that Barnes & Noble is going to close the Nook UK store, and transfer all of their customers to the Sainsbury’s Digital Entertainment on Demand store, along with MOST of their e-books. The Nook UK store will no longer sell e-books on March 15th and the store will close down completely at the end of May.

Barnes and Noble has confirmed with Good e-Reader that there will be no firmware update that will allow UK e-Reader owners to buy e-books on their device. Mary Ellen Keating said “Customers with Readers can download new content from Sainsbury’s to a computer and then sideload it to the device via a USB connection. More details can be found on the Sainsbury’s Entertainment On Demand website.”

It is very likely that thousands of Nook owners in the United Kingdom are not going to register for an Adobe Digital Editions account and take the time to sync all of their purchases from their PC to their e-Reader or tablet. This will drive even more people over to Amazon, who controls close to 95% of the e-book market.

The only way Nook tablet owners will be able to continue reading is if they download the Sainsbury’s app from Google Play or the Good e-Reader App Store.

Barnes and Noble is basically abandoning every single international market and focusing exclusively on the United States, one of the most saturated places in the entire world when it comes to e-books and tech.

Wrap up

I have been covering Barnes and Noble since the original Nook was announced and they opened their online bookstore. I have personally attended 3 different product launches in New York and extensively covered every single major Nook move they have ever made.

The one thing this article proves is that Barnes and Noble has failed e-reader and tablet owners. They don’t understand the market and have done nothing but make their users feel unappreciated. It is no small wonder why Barnes and Noble has lost over a billion dollars on Nook and continues to bleed money every quarter. How can you have faith in a company that basically hates their users and doesn’t understand digital book selling?

Michael Kozlowski is the Editor in Chief of Good e-Reader. He has been writing about electronic readers and technology for the last four years. His articles have been picked up by major and local news sources and websites such as the Huffington Post, CNET and more. Michael frequently travels to international events such as IFA, Computex, CES, Book Expo and a myriad of others. If you have any questions about any of his articles, please send Michael Kozlowski an email to michael@goodereader.com

What a shame. Corporate decisions like this hurt the entire ebook industry.

CalvinT

I terminated my Nook 8 months ago and went with Amazon and Kindle. Why? Hardware failure. The charger died. Went to numerous B&N brick and mortar to purchase a new one. No joy. Went on line. No joy. Contacted B&N. Reply…go to a B&N store. When told they didn’t have any, the reply was to wait a few months for resupply. Really? A few months? It’s been deactivated, collects dust and I’ll eventually just drop it in an ash can, where it belongs.

Michael

“Barnes and Noble is the only company in the e-reader and eBook sector that has nothing but alienate their customers.”
“There has been many cases over the years.”
Sorry. Stopped reading. Go back to high school.

Preventing me from downloading content was the last straw for me. I liked the Nook Simple Touch.. still do actually. I started buying ebooks from B&N because at the time I used a Sony PRS-505 (which I unfortunately lost on an airplane) and it was easy to buy the B&N books and side load them to the reader. I replaced my 505 with a NST, and was happy with B&N until they started making it all but impossible to download the books. I might still read books on the NST, or in my Nook App, but I won’t buy another book from them until they let me download my books again.

Pixilicious

What Nook doesn’t recharge via the USB cable?? You plug it in to your PC or wall charger & you’re good to go for any model I’ve ever heard of.

Reader

In April 2012 Barnes and Noble unveiled their second generation Nook Simple Touch for $139. The prime selling point behind this model was the front-lit technology…… For the first time ever Barnes and Noble edited the memory partition to only allow 500 MB of user loaded content, even though there was 4 GB of total on-device storage.

This was NOT the first time that B&N had limited user loaded content. The first Simple Touch was released in June 2011. This Simple Touch had no front-lit technology. It also limited user loaded content to a stated 250 MB, though my PC reads the actual user loaded content limit at 236 MB.

For an additional reason that B&N has alienated its customers, I would like to point out that the Nook Glowlight Plus makes books less readable compared to the Nook Simple Touch. The background when unlit is worse compared to the Simple Touch, and the Helvetica font has lost its thickness. At least Amazon wised up re Helvetica. Interesting that both companies made the same mistake.

I liked my Simple Touch Glow, or whatever it was called! It was easy to hold and looked fine, but every now and then it would hang, or reboot, losing my page in the book I was reading. It infuriated me enough that I bought a Kobo. I have never relied on a single store for books though. I don;t mind admitting that I’ve bought books from Amazon and WHSmith and stripped the DRM to load them onto my eReader.

rogermashburn

I still have my NOOK HD and NOOK HD+ for my kids to use. I like the ability to make kid profiles and the actual display, it just astonishes me how B&N have got it so wrong since those versions. Once the Google Play store was opened up, I thought they were a steal.

John

Thank goodness for public domain and places like Gutenberg.org!

This a problem that goes with the present paid/drm ebook model. All businesses will eventually fall on hard times. Each time that ebooks are transferred from one business to another, ebooks will be lost. Eventually all ebooks are lost. The publishers get to sell (RENT) more books. Eventually, maybe only throw-aways will be in the paid/drm format.

I agree totally. B&N started out fairly customer-friendly with the Nook. The readers were easily hacked to add new features to the underlying Android, and the books were DRM’ed but the DRM scheme was not onerous. Then every year it seemed they punished their customers more and more. I finally gave up on Nook last year and (illegally?) de-DRM’ed all my Nook content and side-loaded it to a new Kindle, because the last changes to the firmware to get rid of the ability to back up your books made it clear that this was a business that didn’t know what it was doing and was failing. Because even with that change it’s easy enough to get access to your books, or was, anyhow, until recent changes that I foresaw happening when I moved all my content out of the Nook ecosphere.

Meanwhile, Amazon started out kind of locked down, and remains kind of locked down, but doesn’t go out of their way to punish customers. As for Kobo, I want to like them, but a) they don’t have the magazine subscriptions that I want available in their store, and b) their bookstore prices are even higher than Amazon and B&N. So. I guess that means I get to hack my Kobo into a cool little Linux tablet, heh.

I could live with the storage limitations, except for one thing—the Glowlight eliminated the microSD slot. If not for that I might have upgraded my NST a long time ago. I like my NST and continue to use it, but I know when I’ve been insulted.

Froide

How about the NOOK Division’s colossal mishandling of NOOKStudy? Warrants a second article.

Froide

I surmise CalvinT is referring to the proprietary NOOK cable, not to its accompanying wall charger. I know firsthand that the NOOK Tablet and NOOK HD/HD+ devices use charger cables with a proprietary configuration, so if the cable fails, there’s no way to charge the NOOK device without obtaining another cable specifically made for that device.

If, on the other hand, the wall charger died but the proprietary cable didn’t, one could do what Pixilicious suggested.

Drew A.

I have three simple touch eReaders. Started to TRY to use them again after a few years idleness. No longer connecting to wifi, and not able to side load a lending library book, they are basically bricks!

Martin Hunter

I’ve been happy enough with the Nook ecosystem (especially that books sync across the reader and the Nook apps on my phone and computer) that I bought the latest waterproof Nook at Christmas. I REALLY love that device – elegant hardware, and I can read in the tub or anywhere without worrying about the device. Hope they hang in there on the basic eBook business.

Barnes and Noble was the first company to actually make kid profiles, that is something Amazon copied and did a better job with.

Maxwell Rathbone

I just bought and hacked my Nook Simple Touch. It’s now a mostly full blown Android 2.1 tablet. Fully usable to even play Android games on. I was able to side-load my library of over 500 ePub and PDF documents with ease. I’d strongly recommend you look into this as it makes the device fully usable once again.

Another BN misstep was buying fictionwise in 2010 and closing it down. I still really miss fictionwise.

Not only that, but I had purchased thousands of titles from fictionwise and when I followed the directions to merge them with my nook library, the # of titles broke my ability to download books wirelessly. Apparently after a certain number of titles the software jammed and could no longer sync. I tried “archiving” the titles (a laborious one-title-at-a-time This was in 2012, and the problem was never fixed, to my knowledge. It was an early factor in my giving up on the nook ecosystem.

Sydney Ashcraft

That was the breaking point for me. Either full access to the system’s storage or the microSD slot would have been acceptable; deny me both, and you’ve lost a customer. I replaced my dying first edition Glowlight (which did have the microSD!) with a Kindle Voyage last month. I jailbroke it to allow for screensaver switching, and now couldn’t be happier.

Sydney Ashcraft

Removing DRM is a legal gray area. The US court cases I followed pretty much set the precedent that writing cracking software is definitely illegal, but using pre-existing software to make yourself a backup copy falls under Fair Use, so long as you don’t then illegally share the files. It’s weird.

Sydney Ashcraft

Yeah, my first-gen Glow was limited to 250 MB as well. But it had the microSD slot, so I didn’t care back then.

Sydney Ashcraft

This bit of news surprised me… I just opened up Nook for PC and verified that I can still download books (I can). Is it a newer version of the software that added this restriction?

Timill

Don’t think so. I’ve just bought an ebook from B&N, downloaded it to my PC (Win 8), run it through Calibre and uploaded it to my tablet to read in CoolReader.

Ginger

Sorry sorry please help I simply don’t understand, As a UK member, yes, you’re right, I’m not going to bother with all that Sainsbury’s crap, but what can I do to keep the stuff that’s already on my crooknook ? Surely they can’t TAKE IT AWAY ? Do I just never connect to wifi again ? The email they sent March 3rd is incomprehensible and has had no follow-up whatsoever. Thanks for any enlightenment !

Apparently Kobo has started to price match, you’d need to contact their customer support after you purchase the book.

Note, this is from what others have said, I’ve not found books I want to buy which are not the same price

MGlitch

The Glowlight Plus also launched late, BN pushed the release date back at least a few months. Though they had never announced that, based on information I have they expected to launch it around the time they introduced the Samsung Galaxy Tab updates. Even with that extra time BN still launched a ereader which actually lost functionality from every other major brand including BN. It could not load ebooks borrowed from public libraries.

BN did, eventually, fix this issue. But given that it was one that was something they had already had to work around with the HDs (it’s the version of Android on the Glowlight Plus that causes the issues with ADE), it really should never have been sold with the issue existing.

MGlitch

No, you can still use the old software to download books. However for Nook for Mac, Nook Study, and presumably Nook for Windows 7 and under if you had not signed in already it might not let you. Note that signing out and back in seems to work without a hitch. Also Nook for Windows 10 (presumably 8 as well) just plain works.

What people mean when they say download is that the download links for the ebooks were removed from the website. BN also for a long time removed the links to the apps I mentioned, except Windows 10/8, but being the incompetent company they are had not actually removed the webpage so customers were able to access it through google, they did -not- need to access it using the way back machine the pages were still live on bn servers, they just weren’t linked to in the rest of BN’s site. However BN recently revamped their website and it seems the pages have been removed. The software is available elsewhere but it’s a chancey way to download your ebooks anyway.

I recently convinced someone to switch to Kobo, and I just used an old NST which I’d used a hack on to make it download to the SD card rather than internal memory. The hack did not need you to have rooted your Nook, but you did need to follow some semi-technical instructions on making a bootable micro SD card. I then just registered the Nook to their account and downloaded all the ebooks, plugged in the Nook and removed the DRM then loaded them to the Kobo.

Froide

RE: “EIther full access to the system’s storage or the microSD slot would have been acceptable; deny me both, and you’ve lost a customer.”

Color me greedy and demanding, but I require both features, so I can move content from the device to the microSD card as well as back up my content elsewhere.

Sydney Ashcraft

Do any e-ink readers still come with a microSD slot? Kindle and Nook don’t, but I’m not familiar with Kobo or the smaller brands.

Zach kurland

I guess that’s what happens when the only factor in the way with which you conduct business is monetary gain. That’s why I am most likely going to to buy the 13.3 inch Good eReader over the other two. They are giving people what they want, actually listen to feedback and designed a product that they are stoked to use. I am sick of companies telling customers to politely piss off and make due with what “we tell you that you need”…

DK

Most Pocketbook ereaders do. (Not the waterproof one). But ebook-store support is awkward. Their bookstore is so so, so basically it’s what you load via USB (and cloud services, already installed, like Dropbox) and what you download via the internet explorer.

Tim pillinger

I actually like Sainsbury’s as a company, and I can’t think of any brand I’m happier being transferred to. But I DO NOT WANT CREDIT. I want my books.